Musical Anniversaries in 2018

Monday, January 8, 2018

Happy New Year!

It has become something of a tradition for us to kick off the year by taking a look at musical anniversaries for the next twelve months. The people whose birthdays or anniversaries of death we mark are not only composers but they can also be librettists, performers, dedicatees, or people who are in other ways connected to a music manuscript or printed edition. They were born or died in a year ending in 18 or 68.

There are over 900 such people who have sources in the RISM online catalog. Here is a chronological sampling of ten of them:

• Václav Karel Holan Rovenský (ca. 1644-1718), Czech cantor, organist, and composer
• Hedwig Elisabeth Charlotta, Queen of Sweden (1759-1818)
• King Christian IX of Denmark (1768-1848)
• William B. Bradbury, (1816-1868), American composer
• Amalie, Queen of Greece (1818-1875)
• Giulio Baldassarre Briccialdi (1818-1881), Italian composer and flautist
• Livia Frege (1818-1891), German soprano
• Louise Heritte-Viardot (1841-1918), French pianist, singer, and composer
• Sophie Hämmerli-Marti (1868-1942), Swiss writer
• Juventino Rosas (1868-1894), Mexican composer and carillonneur

But leading the pack by far with 2,837 sources in RISM is Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), who died 150 years ago this year. Composers Leopold Koželuh (1747-1818; 1,302 sources) and Nicola Porpora (1686-1768; 1,273 sources) come next, followed by Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1818-1893) with 1,095 sources and the librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) with 1,094.

Here are the full lists (and also as a Google Spreadsheet).

c = circa
a = before
p = after
m = male
w / f = female

Image from pixabay.com.

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Category: Musical anniversaries

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